These are sky lanterns.
They’re marketed as lucky charms,
wishes that people can send up to the heavens.
And every year in Taiwan,
up to 600,000 of them are released into the sky.
And what goes up, well,
eventually has to come down.
Sky lanterns were traditionally used as military signals,
but in the 1990s, Taiwan turned them into a tourist attraction.
For $5 a piece,
you can paint your wishes on a lantern and send it into the sky.
It’s a great photo op for tourists,
but few consider the environmental repercussions.
One sky lantern weighs about 150g (0.33 lb).
If you release 300,000 sky lanterns,
that's an alarming amount of trash.
If you have 30 tons of lanterns each year,
and you recycle 90% of that, you still have 3 tons of trash.
Imagine what happens after many years. It’s quite scary.
There are literally lanterns here landing every single minute.
We are in the town of Shifen,
and this happens every single day, 365 days a year.
Shifen is the sky lantern capital of Taiwan,
and every day, hundreds of tourists come here
to release lanterns into the sky.
But walk five minutes outside of the town,
and this is what you’ll see.
This is Ryan.
And he often takes people on excursions through Taiwan
and hosts trash clean-ups.
Can you break down the last clean-up
that you had with the groups?
The last clean-up here, we had about 20, 25 people,
and we spent just two hours in the forests here along the river.
We cleaned up about 30 bags of sky lanterns.
So we pick up what we can,
and then we give the recyclables to the old ladies.
It's sad and surprising that you see 90-year-old women
hiking in the mountains with their little bamboo poles
trying to get these sky lanterns
and then what's surprising is you find out they get
rice and oil in return.
For the paper? For the paper.
And they get the money for the wire,
but I can't imagine it’s a significant amount.
What’s the use of reselling the lanterns?
You can only get [27 cents] for one.
And you have to clean it up, you have to organize it.
This local farmer has unwillingly amassed
a pile of sky lanterns on his front porch.
When it falls on top of us and we aren’t paying attention,
it will burn our skin.
This thing is really bad.
We have to find a more practical alternative.
A more environmentally-friendly way.
So we thought, since people think sky lanterns are
not environmentally friendly,
then we’ll try an environmentally-friendly alternative.
Shao Aiting is the president of a company called Bank of Culture.
Their goal is preserve traditional Taiwanese crafts.
And in 2016, they came up with a biodegradable lantern.
Traditional lanterns are made out of wire and bamboo,
but this version is made entirely out of
paper and combusts in the sky,
leaving no trace behind.
Everyone we talked to thought that this idea was cool
and said they were willing to use it.
But when we actually went to the sky lantern stores
and promoted our product,
they weren’t as receptive.
They wondered whether or not the product was too expensive.
Was it safe? Blah blah. They actually had a lot of worries.
Price is indeed a factor.
The environmentally-friendly sky lantern
retails for $10 at the store.
Traditional lanterns go for half that price.
We believe the current sky lanterns are priced too low.
They're about $5 to $7.
If you’re coming from America
this really adds no value to the local economy and the craft.
For these activists, their hope is to preserve the practice
of sky lanterns in Taiwan,
without leaving an impact on the environment or the economy.
And they say changing the narrative is the most effective way
to change people's minds.
If your lantern goes up and falls down,
then your wishes won't come true.
But if you spend [$7] on an environmentally-friendly lantern
that combusts completely in the sky,
your wish will be sent into the sky and be received.
So if you give people this story,
then they will be more willing to spend that [$7]
for an environmentally-friendly lantern
and give up on the [$3] lantern that simply falls down.